Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Beginners and experts

The advantage of a more general blogfocus is that I can more easily show off my children! So here's my youngest daughter (5 years) who has taught herself how to read. She currently reads even during lunch and dinner time. She is reading in Dutch in the video. Though there is a system for children's books (avi 1, avi 2, etc) to indicate the level of beginning readers, she actually reads anything she likes. In the video a children's book that parents are supposed to read for their children. As a result, it contains some pretty hard words like 'vliegtuig'.




I've always wondered what makes for a real expert. At times, people who I consider as real beginners are tasked by their organisation to do something I would reserve for an expert, and still they manage to do an impressive job. From Sil's example, you can see that she reads really slowly and has to look at the individual letters first (v-l-ie-g-t-ui-g)before she can recognise the words. In a similar way, experts are probably much faster in doing something, and can recognise pattern much more easily than beginners.

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